In the global economy it is important to communicate with people all over the world. This is typically referred to as collaboration. The endpoints to the collaboration may be a variety of devices such as, for example, a cellular telephone, a personal digital assistant (PDA), or a personal computer (via wireless broadband, e.g., PCMCIA cards. These devices may be connected via a wireless or wired method, or a combination thereof.
For some forms of collaboration, it is desirable to either restrict collaboration participation to those who are within a particular physical area or those who are not within a particular physical area. It may also be desirable to restrict collaboration based on identification of certain persons such as those who have a certain security clearance or on a need to know basis or some combination of the above.
By way of example, for certain sensitive collaborations, it is undesirable or in some cases illegal to include certain persons or persons in a particular physical location. Illustratively, in the discussion of information subject to government export restrictions, it may be deemed an export violation to discuss certain sensitive information with individuals in a specific country.
Current practice to restrict access to certain communications includes merely asking a person if they are within the physical area of restriction or if they have certain security clearances. However, whether the collaboration is restricted depends strictly on their trustworthiness for an accurate response. In the security industry, this type of control is known as discretionary access control (DAC) because the enforcement of the access control is at the discretion of the user.
This technique is not possible for nonhuman mobile systems, such as PDAs or personal computers (PC). So, for such nonhuman mobile systems, there is no known collaboration system to enforce restrictions on collaboration participants. However, in the security industry, there is mandatory access control (MAD), which is enforcement of the access control mandated by the system and not under control of the user. This is a more reliable access control method.
Accordingly, there exists a need in the art to overcome the deficiencies and limitations described hereinabove.